


HOT MESS

by friedgalaxies



Series: snitches get stitches [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Disabled Character, F/M, Family Dynamics, Gen, M/M, Multi, Non-Traditional Families, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:42:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25495540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friedgalaxies/pseuds/friedgalaxies
Summary: Dediara Yamanaka is twenty, a college sophomore, and a self proclaimed hot mess.
Relationships: Deidara & Sasori (Naruto), Deidara/Uchiha Itachi, Konan/Nagato | Pain/Yahiko, Other Relationship Tags to Be Added
Series: snitches get stitches [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1846960
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21





	1. pin

**Author's Note:**

> this is the first of several fics, born of mine and a friend's modern au ramblings that got,, more than a little out of hand. half the credit for these ideas go to him, such as making itadei a pairing in this au in the first place, and this wouldn't exist without him acting as my sounding board to bounce ideas off of constantly. the original inspiration for this au is also [this post!]()

Dediara Yamanaka is twenty, a college sophomore, and a self proclaimed hot mess.

Deidara is a lot of things, and he’ll be the first to loudly claim all of them like grand titles bestowed upon a knight or king; an artist, a good friend, the life of any party, loud, obnoxious, a fruit, a bastard, a bitch. But of all the titles he’s proudest of, and the only one that’s self proclaimed and self proclaimed alone, is the bold “HOT MESS” he wears like a crooked crown atop a mop of cornsilk yellow waves and a cockily tilted brow.

His friends, bless their souls, are quick to assure him that no, Deidara, you’re not a hot mess! You’re doing fine!

But Deidara isn’t one to fool himself. He knows he’s a hot mess, has heard it from other people enough before he stumbled across the lovely little conglomerate of people that would come to be his closest friends in the world and whispers stopped following him like a bad smell-- or a bad ex, going by Deidara’s track record-- to know that it’s what other people truly think of him. And good for them, for their excellent judge of character! If he’s anything, Deidara is hot!

So, being the hot mess that he is, is why Deidara is standing half-clothed and elbow deep in clay mere minutes before his roommate for this year is due to arrive, taking up a truly selfish amount of space in the little communal area of their college suite. He’d just been struck with sudden inspiration for a sculpture that, while small enough to comfortably fit in the communal area of the little suite, was far too large to fit into his own closet of a bedroom, and he wouldn’t have access to his studio for at least another two days! Frankly, it was ridiculous to deprive an artist of Deidara’s caliber of a working space, so he’d simply laid out a couple drop cloths-- he wasn’t an animal, despite whatever Sasori might have to say on the contrary-- and got to work on his latest masterpiece.

He’d gotten hot from the amount of kneading and stretching he was putting into this damn stubborn clay not but twenty minutes in, so his shirt had been long shed and thrown across the back of the thrift store couch, leaving Deidara standing in only his binder and a pair of paint stained jeans. When he was truly in the zone, he tended to focus so solely on the project in front of him to the point of frenzy, which he’d also had to have friends break him out of in the past with reminders that he had a human body that needed, y’know, food and water and sleep.

This state of frenzy could also have contributed to the fact that he didn’t hear the door opening till it made contact with the wall and had Deidara spinning around in shock, throwing a fistful of clay in the vague direction of the door. It connected with the wall with a loud splat, a fat glob of off-white sliding slowly down the wall and leaving patchy streaks in its wake. Deidara sighed. That clay had been expensive! And whatever poor soul had been assigned as his dorm’s RA this year likely wouldn’t be too happy, either.

Deidara was so caught up in mourning the lost flow of his creativity and the possible sacrifice of his nice, expensive clay that he almost didn’t notice the person standing stock-still in the doorway, hand pressed to their chest like an old woman overcome with the urge to faint in horror.

Deidara’s first thought was, _damn, Housing’s gonna kill me if I scare another one away!_ His second thought was a much belated, _wow, fuck Housing, new roommate is_ hot!

And despite the sweater neatly laid over a crisp white button down and the little glasses low on a wide nose and the assumed fainting debutante nature, which was gonna be a much bigger issue if they were truly Deidara’s roommate of all people, the silent stranger standing in the doorway that Deidara had kinda maybe almost assaulted was pretty hot. Deidara had a thing for tall, strong, silent types, which was pretty funny considering his last boyfriend had been a manlet who chattered his ear off incessantly and was clingy to the point of having to enlist Hidan’s buff dumb ass to run him off when he just wouldn’t stop fucking following him to said buff idiot’s house, like it was any of his business which of his friend’s houses Deidara went to and how long he stayed there in the first place.

“Hi!” Deidara tried, because if throwing clay at his new roommate was anything if not a poor introduction, then maybe he could salvage it with an actual, verbal one. Deidara thought about offering his hand, but then realized they were still covered in clay and desperately needed to be cleaned, so he kept them to himself. “I’m Deidara, hm! I’m guessing-- hm, hm-- I’m guessing we’re roommates? What’s your name?”

“Uh,” Tall, Strong, And Silent said and wow, that was a much more gravelly voice than Deidara had been expecting. Was this guy a smoker or did he just gargle sand for breakfast, or what? “Itachi. Uchiha. Itachi Uchiha. We’re roommates, yes. This is a suite, though, correct?”

“Yep!” Deidara chirped, already moving to see if the clay he had used as an unintentional projectile could be salvaged. He thought about throwing his shirt back on but at this point his roommate had already seen all there was to see, and if he had a problem with it, well, there were few things Deidara couldn’t call Hidan or Kakuzu or Kisame in for these days (Kisame especially, that guy was like a knight in shining armor without all the pompous peacocking and double the good looks.) The clay seemed alright, at least. Deidara brushed a few stray carpet fuzzies off with his thumb and went back to sculpting, though with much less fervor than before.

Deidara technically wasn’t enough of an upperclassman to qualify for a suite yet, but he’d been in suites since freshman year, as according to his 504 plan. Freshman year had been when he roomed with Sasori, actually, and even though the two of them had met in high school they had grown much closer during that year. Both of them were disabled, Sasori with his Cerebral Palsy and Deidara with Autism, Tourette Syndrome, PTSD, and partial amputation in both arms (which he wore really fucking cool prosthetics for that Kakuzu had pressured an engineering major into 3D printing for him back when Deidara was still a high school sophomore and Kakuzu had just started his freshman year of college in a business course.)

As part of their accommodations, both he and Sasori had been given rooms in the college dorms on campus at reduced cost and in suites, for their own privacy and ease of access with getting to their classes, since the suite dorms were closer to the majority of their classes than the regular freshman dorms had been. Deidara wasn’t exactly going to complain, even if the attempt at accommodation on his end felt a little ham fisted, considering he could walk just fine-- well, most days, anyhow. There were times when his tics got so intense it became difficult to do much but sit there and let them wreak havoc on his body. His friend group had seen him through many of these tic attacks, which had only multiplied in number during the more stressful parts of their college education and would likely continue to do so.

Deidara could only assume that his new roommate was similarly disabled, because he couldn’t have been anything but Deidara’s own age, even accounting for the scars that creased his face in diagonal lines starting at the inner corners of his eyes. Maybe that was why he wore the glasses, from an eye injury? Whatever, it wasn’t important.

“Is it your-- hm!-- your first year here?” Deidara asked, smoothing out the curve of a clay cheekbone with his thumb. “I’ve never seen you around campus before.”

Itachi had already taken to slowly wheeling his many bags in, including a strange little box with more dials and knobs and blinking lights on it than anything Deidara had ever seen, excepting during his (numerous) hospital stays. It kind of looked like some kind of shoddy art project one of his classmates would throw together, as a kind of bullshit commentary on modern society and its reliance on machines. Get back to Deidara with that shit when you lose both your arms, coward.

Distantly, Deidara wondered what this new guy’s major was, if he had even declared one at all. If he was a sophomore like Deidara he still had to be working through gen ed classes, right?

“Yeah,” Itachi said, slowly, which either meant he thought Deidara was stupid already or he was just a little overwhelmed by Deidara’s whirlwind of an introduction. The latter was much more understandable than the former, in Deidara’s humble opinion. He knew he was loud, and kind of ditzy, and more than a little annoying, and really, obviously, blonde, but he wasn’t stupid. He was actually a lot more cunning than most gave him credit for; which was also probably how he managed to cruise smoothly through his classes only to pull a jaw-dropping stunt at the end of the year that, somehow, put him in all of his previous art teachers’ good books and secured perfect final project grades.

“I started college, ah, a little later than most.” Itachi admitted, and oh, his hesitation made sense, there. Deidara had personally gotten late to the high school game, considering the vast amounts of recovering, healing, and physical therapy he had to go through post amputation-- which wasn’t even mentioning the struggle for accommodations all four years of high school, but Deidara didn’t really feel like getting angry about that right now. He had much more pressing matters to get to. Namely: interrogation. After all, what kind of friend would he be if he didn’t even show up to lunch tomorrow with hot gossip on his new roommate?

“That’s nothing to worry about! I started high-- hm! Hm, hm!-- high school later than most people, ‘cause I had to get some surgeries,” Deidara offered, gently stretching out what would become a tongue between his fingertips. “A couple of my friends even act like they’re, like, retiree age already, so I don’t think anyone is gonna judge you, hm.”

“That’s good to hear,” Itachi said, clearing his throat. “Why do you keep making that noise? Do you need a losenge?”

He even produced one from the pocket of his peacoat as he said it and oh, jeez, this guy really was much softer than Deidara had anticipated, huh.

“No, don’t worry, I’m not sick or anything,” Deidara smiled, flashing what he had been told was a prize winning grin. “I just have Tourette’s. The little ‘hm’ noise is one of my tics.”

Itachi’s cheeks colored, high and pink on sharp cheekbones. “Oh.”

“It’s okay!” Deidara laughed, because really, that was far from the worst reaction he’d gotten. “That’s also why I threw clay at you earlier, actually. I tic when I’m startled, usually.”

Itachi blinked. “You throw things at people when you tic?” he asked, with an intentional dryness Deidara hadn’t expected to come from his meek new roommate. Maybe they’d get along better than he thought.

Deidara grinned again, though it was more like a baring of his teeth than anything. It was best to get his flaws, if one were to consider certain characteristics of his in such a manner, out of the way as soon as possible. If people were going to judge him, everyone involved was far better off if they did so from the start and didn’t bother hiding it. Sasori had been anything but bashful in his outright disdain for Deidara when they first met, and now the two of them were best friends!

Deidara knew this to be true even if the man in question had never and would never, even under threat of death, say it out loud, because Sasori had kept every single sculpture and piece of art Deidara had gifted him over the years, no matter how small or shitty it was. Deidara had one of Sasori’s own hand customized dolls sitting in a place of pride on his bookshelf, with it’s beautifully articulated joints and almost terrifyingly realistic face. Deidara loved it. If his house were burning down and he could only save one thing, it would be that doll.

“I do lots of things as tics— tics can be just about anything, not just curse words like in books and on TV. Hm! Hm, hm! Kind of embarrassing sometimes, really, especially the verbal— Sasori’s a twink!— the verbal ones, but at least I don’t usually hit myself or break things.” Thinking about Sasori so much had triggered his one Sasori-related tic, born of a common conversation amongst their friend group. It had always been something Deidara and Sasori teased each other over, and had eventually been adopted by the rest of the group until it became something of a running joke. Deidara just wished he hadn’t picked it up as a tic, but it was far from the most incriminating tic he’d ever had or even even heard of.

Those few months he’d ticced, “I have drugs!” came close, though.

Itachi’s brow wrinkled in concern. “‘Usually’?”

“Yeah, usually. Sometimes when I’m having a bad tic today I’ll crush whatever I’m holding, or hit myself in the head. Hm!” He made a vague motion to the prosthesis on his own arms. “When that happens I try to take these off. Aluminum really hurts when you crack it against your skull, hm!”

“Oh.” Itachi glanced down a his packaged belongings, and it was then that Deidara registered that he’d kept the man from yet unpacking. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay!” Deidara laughed, even though there was a voice in the back of his head that sounded an awful lot like Konan reminding him that no matter how much he said it, that didn’t mean it had to be. He ignored her and continued to shape out the gentle swell of a pair of full lips on his sculpture, the only feature on an otherwise organically smooth face. “Just don’t, like, judge me for it, yeah?”

“I wouldn’t.” Itachi assured him. He glanced down at his belongings again meaningfully. Deidara had a sneaking suspicion he would rather end the conversation here and go unpack. “I would never.”

“And then he said, ‘I would never,’” Deidara recited, voice dropping into a poor imitation of Itachi’s disinterested gravel the next afternoon over the wooden kitchen table of the Akatsuki— the name of their group’s on again, off again garage punk band— frat house, “and just left! I haven’t seen— hm, yeah, hm!— I haven’t seen him ever since then, not even at breakfast this morning!”

“Of course he’d avoid you, brat.” Sasori bit back, stabbing wilting lettuce leaves on a wide ceramic handled fork. He was awfully fond of the nickname despite the fact that he had barely a year on Deidara and was awfully close to punting size.

“He doesn’t mean it like that, Deidara,” Kisame assured Deidara from his seat in the wooden chair that he positively dwarfed next to him. He placed a broad hand on Deidara’s upper arm and squeezed, gently. Everything about Kisame was gentle, especially considering his size. Deidara had quickly come to appreciate it, and appreciated even more the fact that his sheer bulk and intimidating features made Kisame an absolute terror to those who didn’t know him well. “I’m sure this Itachi is just a private sort of guy. Besides, starting college is overwhelming for anyone.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Deidara sighed, yanking on his own hair with a wince. Kisame gently brushed it back over his shoulders and out of immediate reach for him.

That was another thing Deidara appreciated about his friends. Despite the vast majority of them having prickly, social-repellant exteriors, they had come to know each other well over the years. They anticipated each other’s movements easily and didn’t bother with useless questioning. If something needed to happen, it did, many hands moving without having to be asked. The introduction of a _stranger_ into his living space and thus into his life had thrown off Deidara’s routine completely. Itachi Uchiha was a wrench in the intricate cogs of Deidara’s life.

A frustratingly, annoyingly handsome wrench.

“You still hungry, Dei?” Nagato asked, turning from the kitchen counter with a flick of the joystick of his motorized wheelchair.

“I’m hungry.” Sasori said, even with his plate still full of salad.

“I didn’t ask you, Sasori,” Nagato tutted. He rolled his eyes indulgently as Sasori muttered something under his breath about rabbit food and turned back to Deidara, thin brows raised in question.

“Need anything to take back to your dorm? If I remember correctly, you have a mini-fridge this year.”

“Nah. Thanks, though, Nao.” Deidara said, even though he knew Nagato would be sending him home with a container of gluten free mac’n’cheese not-so-secretly slipped into his bag and a little note to remember to take care of himself in his friend’s familiar, painstakingly neat scrawl.

“You guys still coming to my exhibition next week?” Deidara asked, hope evident in his voice.

“I will if it’s accessible.” Nagato promised.

Deidara rolled his eyes, though if anyone understood his friend’s concerns, then it was himself. “Of course! I would’ve pitched a fit and they would’ve had to drag— yeah! Hm, hm— drag me kicking and screaming from the dean’s office if it wasn’t.”

Somehow, the vast majority of the Akatsuki were disabled in one manner or another, so accessible venues were a must. Nagato, Yahiko, and Konan had managed to score a wonderfully accessible house their first year at the school and clung to it like a drowning man to a life raft ever since. Deidara had a working theory about disabled people gravitating towards each other like they had some kind of magnetic pull, not unlike iron shavings to a magnet. But what did he know, he was an arts and STEM student, not a philosophy major. That was Hidan’s bag, probably.

“I’m still surprised you managed to get an exhibition a week into sophomore year,” came Konan’s soft voice as she rounded the corner, twisting her lavender hair up into a bun with one hand and securing it with a metal hairpin Hidan had made for her out of a broken screwdriver with the other. Deidara’s nose scrunched of its own accord, but he would’ve knit his face up in surprise either way.

“You doubt me, of all people? I’m insulted, Konan.”

“No, you aren’t.” She poked at his ankle with her bare foot as she passed the table, pressing a kiss to the top of Nagato’s head and retrieving a bowl from the cupboard upon reaching the counter.

“No, I’m not!” Deidara agreed.

He liked his friends. Loved them, even. He just wasn’t sure where Itachi Uchiha fit in the intricate, fray-edged tapestry of his life, yet.

The tapestry that was Deidara Yamanaka was intricate. Beautiful, even. Made of gossamer spider threads and fine silks, knotted up and tangled in some places and smooth as running water in others. There were patches that had been burnt out, edges still smoldering, and patches that seemed to never have existed at all. It was vibrant in its colors, and entrancing in its depth. It was uniquely Deidara, and he wore it like armor over slender, freckled shoulders.

His life had been anything but a smooth ride, or even a typical one. He didn’t like to compare suffering against others, because it was truly just an exercise in futility with anyone who entered coming out a loser and no consolation prizes, but he liked to think his life had been at least a little rough.

Deidara didn’t really know his parents. Not that they had died, or estranged him, or given him up for adoption, but that they simply weren’t… there. There had been no presence in his life that he looked up at and said with the kind of reverence reserved only for those one considered family, “I love you,” or, “I trust you.” The only person Deidara had as a constant in his life from ages birth to fourteen years was himself. He was independent. Ingenuitive. Clever.

Awfully, terribly, cursedly lonely.

He had always had an affinity for danger. Even before he could walk he was always the infant reaching for things he shouldn’t have had, whether it be knives or open outlets or stove tops yet to cool off. He liked to live on the edge. He liked adrenaline. He liked to toe the precise of living and dying and taste the bitter wind of chance against his teeth, on his tongue, hot like blood and cold like regret.

He liked fire. He loved explosions. He loved trouble.

Deidara had never been a good kid, if there even was a textbook definition of good kid that he could have ever fit into. The crisp, clean lines of a cookie cutter prodigal child were not one that Deidara fit comfortably into, even with all his intellect and charm and passion. He purposely sought out the bad kids, the troubled kids, the kids several years his senior that he definitely shouldn’t have even looked the same way as.

It had taken one lighter. One fumble, one open flame, and a whole lot of pain.

They had been hanging out in one of the many abandoned buildings in the urban area Deidara and the upperclassmen he clung to like a leech frequented. In his memory, the kids were faceless. In his memory, they were younger than he was now, sixteen or seventeen at most. Still just children making stupid decisions with stupid outcomes for stupid prizes. It had once been a parking garage, maybe, but was now littered with so much graffiti on the old, crumbling concrete that it was hard to tell.

One stray puddle of what looked like water, a lighter, and a stumble.

He had always been a firebug. He carried a lighter on him constantly, whether it was one of the cheap little zippos from the gas station near his school or the chunky stainless steel square he nabbed from his dad’s desk drawer. The one he had at the time was red, with a skull drenched in flames emblazoned on the side. It seemed like a harbinger, now, looking back at the little red lighter in his teenage hand that had no right to be as detailed or alive as it was.

Trip. Stumble. Miss.

The smell of fire, and an explosion.

Hot, wet blood on his face, on his arms. On what he could feel of his arms. Of blistering, aching burns all down his arms and face and chest. Of rubble and debris and stone chips lodged into his skin. Of screams of terror and crying and why were they crying, he was the one hurt, wasn’t he?

Months in the hospital. His hair was damaged beyond repair, so they’d shaved his head. His arms were even worse, so they’d sawn them off, sparing as much of his bone and flesh as they could. It hadn’t been enough to save his hands.

He would never draw again, or paint, or sculpt, or flick a lighter and watch the flame dance and inhale the smell of fire like a drug.

His left arm now ended in a stump a third of the way past his wrist, knobbly and twisted and scarred and disgusting. His right arm was far worse off. It ended just past the upper half of his elbow, to the point where they’d taken the joint out and left him without anything to even play act at grabbing with. He could at least teach himself to hold a spoon or a fork with the bend of his left arm, maybe.

It was an addiction, apparently. They sent him to group therapy and made him talk about his issues in a room full of other kids in the same hospital gowns with the same vacant look in their eyes and the same defeat in their voice. He didn’t want to end up like this. He didn’t want to be a dead man walking, and he wasn’t even old enough to be considered a man yet. He was just fourteen, even if he’d already made the biggest mistake of his life.

His arms, his hands, his hair shorn down to a golden peach fuzz hadn’t been the only thing to change, and they certainly wouldn’t be the last. Apparently, intimate exposure to fire and falling rubble had a tendency to leave lasting neurological damage like the world’s nastiest parting gift, and they still weren’t quite sure if it had been hiding in his brain stem, waiting for the chance to be awakened, or if it had been from the damage of the injury itself. They cooked him in MRI machines like a prize turkey, white coffins of metal and plastic that hummed so fucking loud it rattled his teeth. He’d seen the scans with his own two eyes and still didn’t register whether it had been natural or not, if he’d been born even worse off than he already thought or just horribly unlucky.

Well, he knew he was horribly unlucky— frankly, he’d be blessed if Lady Luck let him lick the bottom of her heel— but it was the principle of the thing.

So along with the amputation and the trauma and the general fucked-upped-ness of the whole situation, he got the tendency to shout whatever words came to mind or smack the utensils out of the hands of the nurses who had so graciously accepted the labor of feeding him or pummeling himself in the head with his own freshly operated on stumps.

At least his little cousin visited him in the hospital, which was positively the only good thing he’d gleaned out of the whole affair. Ino was a few years younger than him and still had a wide eyed look about her and wouldn’t look directly at his stumps, but she called him by the right name and spent more than a few minutes talking to him, even if he was still in morphine-addled haze for the most part.

Really, why his family members thought it would do him any good to visit when he was fresh out of surgery and could barely remember his own name was beyond him.

Uncle Inoichi tried for a joke, but it didn’t land, as per usual. He got to see little Ino more than the once per year family reunion and holiday gatherings he barely bothered to attend, though, which felt like some kind of win with all things considered.

So even though he was out of the hospital and could feed himself if given the proper equipment and enough time and was starting to be able to dress himself, he still had an addiction and trauma and had to attend court mandated group therapy. Something about outreach for at-risk youth, whatever whatever.

Sasori had stuck out like a sore thumb in those meetings, and, with his magnetic sense for trouble, Deidara had gravitated towards him immediately. Sasori was bundled up in a cardigan two sizes two big and tucked himself into the chair furthest from the group possible but was still, unfortunately, within the circle and subjected to Deidara’s attempts at friendliness. He was small and red haired and had a face like he’d just eaten something sour before it crawled into his mouth and died and Deidara was infatuated immediately.

They made them all stand and say their names and why they were there, and Deidara was proud to admit he had more than one person recoil slightly in horror.

“I’m Deidara,” he said, standing on slightly wobbly legs, “and I blew myself up, hm, hm! Now I’m a double amputee and I have Tourette’s and trauma, apparently. I don’t wanna be here.”

The woman running the group thanked him for sharing and he was allowed to sit down. Sasori was next, but he didn’t stand, instead curling in on himself even more if that was a thing within the realm of human possibility.

“I’m Sasori.” he said. “I’m not going to stand because I have Cerebral Palsy. I’m here because I broke a kid’s arm for picking on me. I don’t want to be here either.”

Deidara ticced and smacked Sasori’s shoulder with his left stump. It stung like fire, and so did Sasori’s glare. Deidara beamed.

They’d become easy friends after that, being the only two kids in the group who knew they rightfully did not deserve to be there, no matter what court mandates and child psychiatrists said. To Deidara’s unending surprise, Sasori actually had a small group of friends. His granny made him attend a support group for kids their age with disabilities at the same community center they attended their group therapy meetings at. Deidara demanded to be introduced, and before he knew it he was being introduced to the rest of their ragtag little group.

Deidara swung his legs excitedly as they went around the circle and introduced themselves.

A girl with dark hair and darker eyes introduced herself first in a soft voice. “Konan. I have clinical depression, and Autism.”

A boy with blood-red hair almost the same shade as Sasori’s in a motorized wheelchair, sitting to her immediate left. “Nagato. I have muscular dystrophy. It’s nice to meet you.”

Another boy, with ginger hair stuck up in a half dozen wild cowlicks and pale eyes. “Yahiko. I can’t remember what I have.”

“Gastroparesis.” Konan chimed in helpfully. Yahiko nodded.

“Gastroparesis. Glad you’re here.”

Another boy— there were so many boys in this group, Konan must be tired of them— with hair so pale Deidara doubted it even had any pigment and a broad grin on his even paler face. “Hidan! I’m Albino, and I’ve got Nystagmus, but I can still see pretty alright. I hope you’re as cool as Sasori has been hypin’ you up to be.”

Deidara glanced at his friend, who appeared to be trying to disappear into his cardigan with a fierce red blush quickly overtaking his round face.

Another boy with brown skin that made Hidan’s seem even more concerningly pale next to him, bright green eyes staring intensely out from behind a curtain of black hair past his shoulders. He seemed a little older than the rest of them, too. “Kakuzu. Congenital heart defect. I’ve had it replaced already.”

The last stranger, who Deidara couldn’t see anything immediately off about at first glance, but he’d also seemed perfectly fine before the accident and he managed to blow himself up, pretty much.

The last stranger was tall and broad and smiled with a mouthful of crooked teeth, giving a small wave. “I’m Kisame. I’m Autistic, but otherwise I’m just here for moral support. It’s nice to meet you!”

“You already know me.” Sasori grumbled.

Deidara stood with a flourish. “I’m Deidara! I blew myself up and now I’m missing both arms! I’m also Autistic and I have Tourette’s now. It’s so great to be finally amongst people with taste!”

A snicker came up from the corner, and Deidara pointed his left stump accusingly at a bored-looking young adult with a gnarled scar on the right half of his face and a dark mop of scruffy hair. “And who are you, to be laughing at me?”

“Obito.” the man said, grinning crookedly. “I’m visually impaired, pretty obviously.” He gestured to the right of his face.

“He’s our supervisor. He doesn’t really do much but leads group sometimes and makes sure we don’t get in trouble.” Nagato explained patiently. Deidara hummed, stamped his foot in a tic, and sat back down.

“I like it here.” he declared. He could’ve sworn Sasori hid a grin in the collar of his cardigan.


	2. fuse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sasori and deidara take a nap, some talks are had, and itachi is awkward.

Deidara finds himself laying on Sasori’s workbench for the third time that week, and it’s not even Thursday yet.

Sasori is delicately carving away at a new ball jointed doll he’s working on, smoothing out the curves in the clay till his highly critical eye deems it perfect enough to be casted for the base of a mold. Even then, Deidara doesn’t doubt that he’ll find a dozen more imperfections in what would be a flawless model to anyone else after it’s finally casted, but that’s not Deidara’s deal right now. He can focus on Sasori’s perfectionist complex and inability to not work himself to the bone with things that should’ve been carefree hobbies later, when he wasn’t having a crisis.

Deidara laid parallel along the length of the workbench, head pillowed in Sasori’s lap while the redhead muttered to himself and just barely bothered to avoid getting clay dust in Deidara’s eyes. Really, it was the communal workspace for the entire Akatsuki house, one Deidara himself sometimes borrowed when he needed an extra space to spread out his materials or perhaps steal Hidan’s tools to perfect an explosive unit that would be going into his next public performance art piece, but Sasori had commandeered so much of it at this point that it might as well have been his.

Doll pieces, tubs of varying types of clay, scraps of sandpaper, and small, fine tools for further customizing his dolls were scattered in a vague sort of organized configuration across the workspace, along with a thin layer of clay dust that made Deidara sneeze every time he wandered into the basement. A tiered rotating rack of paints and stains sat to the side of the table proper, a dizzying array of colors that made Deidara’s head spin every time Sasori flicked through it to find a new color. He wouldn’t be surprised if the paint fumes had done permanent damage to his best friend’s brain at this point, either, considering how much time he spent down here.

Sasori had never really been a people type of person.

But Sasori’s antisocial tendencies weren’t Deidara’s issue here, either.

The issue he was dealing with at the moment was that he had an exhibition coming up next week to the day, he had a sculpture to finish for it before then, a report to write on said sculpture, and he couldn’t fucking focus in his own suite to work on the sculpture but his studio wouldn’t be open for another month because of sudden water damages. Really, he had never been so enraged at the poor handling of college funding and the neglect of the arts, which was absolutely wild in this situation, considering his school was arts focused!

And the root of all his issues, of course?

His new fucking roommate.

Deidara groaned deep in his chest, turning his head and smushing his cheek into Sasori’s knee. Sasori peered down at him, thin stripe of a red brow just barely raised to show his concern. Sasori had a partial palsy in his face, alongside his limbs, but he just generally wasn’t a very emotive person in general.

“You alright down there?” Sasori asked, not seemingly caring one way or another if Deidara was actually experiencing acute emotional distress. Which, granted, when they’d first met Deidara had been quite the dramatic person and had barely controlled fits of passionate rage or anxiety nearly every other day, but he liked to think he’d been doing better, especially these past few months! That was what his therapist told him, at least, and he legally wasn’t allowed to lie.

“No,” Deidara groaned, pulling up Sasori’s apron from where it rested on his legs underneath his head and letting it fall over his face like a particularly dusty veil. He ticced hard at that moment, smacking himself in the nose. “Ow! Fuck!”

Sasori hummed, setting down his specially adjusted-- courtesy of Hidan-- wide handled brushes, so as to make it easier for his partially paralyzed fingers to grip, taking the hand Deidara had just smacked himself with into his own. Beyond the customizations he did on his dolls, from painting in features so delicate and realistic that one would be hard pressed to distinguish them from real people in photographs to sewing tiny little clothes that Deidara himself wouldn’t have passed up wearing had they been human-sized, Sasori was just plain good with his hands. He had seen Deidara through many tic attacks, soothing him down from the anxious high of over-firing nerves and helping him remove his prosthetics with deft movements, so as not to injure them or himself any further.

Sasori ran his hand down the length of Deidara’s arm till his fingers met actual flesh instead of silicone-sleeved aluminum, massaging along the tight muscle of Deidara’s bicep and digging his thumb into the inside of his elbow where a knot of scar tissue sat. Deidara sighed, willing himself to relax.

“What’s got you all wound up, brat?” Sasori asked, voice low, as it usually was. For all that Deidara was loud and bold and attention seeking, Sasori was quiet and withdrawn and prickly. They fit together oddly, but Deidara wouldn’t trade his relationship with his best friend for anything, no matter how callous he could be at times.

Sasori secretly felt, deeply, achingly, with his whole entire heart and soul, but preferred to slip on a mask as perfect as that of one of his doll’s face plates instead.

“Don’t laugh?” Deidara whined.

“No promises.” Sasori quipped back, but they both knew it meant he wouldn’t, he never would, unless Deidara gave the go-ahead by laughing at himself first.

Deidara appreciated that. He appreciated the fact that his friends just _understood,_ Sasori most of all. As distant and cold and downright rude their relationship could be perceived as at times, they had been partnered together so many times over the years it was practically second nature to gravitate towards each other like planets lost in orbit. For a long time, Deidara hadn’t had anyone but himself--

(A doubtful voice in the back of his head liked to remind him that he would only ever have himself, that eventually everyone would leave him for some reason or another. He was too loud, too annoying, too high maintenance, too broken. Too impulsive and destructive and addictive. Too much for anyone but himself, so he kept pushing and pushing himself till even he wasn’t comfortable with his own actions, just to see who stuck around. He didn’t know why he did it, anymore, beyond the fact that it was habitual to bare his teeth and shout and scream and act like he was relishing in the fact that people flinched away from him and cleared space when he entered the room. Not to include him, but to make sure he didn’t come any closer.)

\--but eventually he found Sasori and Sasori found him and Sasori shuffled him into his own friend group, like shuffling the joker back into a deck of playing cards.

And now he was laying on an uncomfortable wooden bench with his head in Sasori’s lap and Sasori’s fingers digging into the tough knot of scar tissue and muscle that was the part of his left stump that peeked up past the edge of his prosthetic.

Deidara sighed. Scrunched his nose up in a tic. Splayed his right hand over his face, whining into his palm. Sasori tugged on his earlobe.

“My roommate is too fucking _hot!_ ” Deidara whined, the end of his sentence turning into a high-pitched noise that was almost too intelligible to register as a word anymore.

Against his word, Sasori laughed.

“You’re so mean to me!” Deidara huffed against the backdrop of Sasori’s giggles, still holding Deidara’s arm for support as his narrow shoulders shook. “Yeah, hm! You are so-- hm! Hm!-- so mean and rude to me, hm, and you don’t appreciate me and--”

“Alright, brat,” Sasori gasped, tugging at Deidara’s earlobe again, this time much less gently. “I’ll listen to your gripes about how your new roommate is too fucking hot for your little whore ass, yes?”

Deidara would’ve kicked him if he could reach.

“I’m getting a divorce, hm.” Deidara grumbled, though he made no attempts to move from where he lay in Sasori’s lap, the other man starting up with his massage again, moving from Deidara’s bicep up into the curve of his shoulder.

Sasori snorted. “Will you be taking the kids?”

“Yeah, hm, I’m taking Hiruko and Third and-- hm-- you’re gonna have to pay alimony so they can go to a nice private school, yeah.” Deidara lifted Sasori’s apron from where it still lay over his face so he could look up at his friend’s face. Sasori’s brow was furrowed slightly in concentration, both hands now worrying at a tight knot of muscle in the junction between Deidara’s neck and shoulder.

“I want visitation,” Sasori muttered, pressing his thumb into the base of Deidara’s skull, right below his ear. He smoothed it down the muscle like he was rubbing out the imperfections in a new rough doll sculpt, pausing every so often to circle the pad of his thumb. Deidara hummed in contentment.

“Weekends and holidays only, bitch.” Deidara chirped.

“Is he really that distractingly hot, or do you just have low standards?” Sasori asked, turning the conversation on its head so fast it almost made Deidara’s head spin. Almost.

“I don’t know is the thing!” Deidara nearly shouted. Sasori frowned and dug the pad of his thumb further into his shoulder in warning. Deidara huffed but lowered his volume as he continued, clenching his fists open-shut-open-shut multiple times in an anxious tic. “He-- yeah-- he spends so much time in his room and at first I-- hm, hm!-- I thought it was just because he’s a private guy, which is like, fine-- yeah, hm, hm! Yeah!-- but he avoids me like the fucking plague and I can’t tell if-- hm!-- if I’m getting so distracted by him because I hate him-- art is an explosion!-- or I wanna fuck-- fuck!-- him!”

“Hey, hush,” Sasori’s voice dropped into just barely a whisper, carding a hand through the hair at the base of Deidara’s skull in a way he had long since learned calmed him like nothing else, even when his tics got so intense in his distress he could hardly speak or breathe. Deidara simmered, melting into the touch against his own better judgement. Sasori squished his friend’s face between thumb and forefinger, wrinkling his nose down at him. Deidara peered back up, a questioning look on the half of his face that wasn’t currently being held hostage by Sasori’s small hand.

“Let’s take a nap.”

“But—“

“No ‘but’s.” Sasori hummed. He began putting away his supplies with reverent care, still never shifting Deidara’s head from his lap. “Nap time, and then I’ll help you with your sculpture. Sound good?”

“Okay.” Deidara hummed, because that was as good as he was going to get out of this situation and it would only get worse if he pressed Sasori on it— speaking from firsthand experience. “My place or yours?”

“Yours. The hooligans are watching a soccer game again.” Sasori made an expression of barely restrained disgust. “I can hear them all the way from my room.”

The hooligans, in this case, were Hidan, Kakuzu, Kisame, and Yahiko. As polite as the majority of them tended to be and as limited Kakuzu’s patience for speech with most people was, they got a kind of uproariously loud Deidara hadn’t experienced in situations other than the Yamanaka yearly gatherings. Uncle Inoichi was an awfully loud man even without the grease of a sports game on the television and a shitty can of piss-water beer.

Konan and Nagato had little interest in sports, beyond the fact that they simply were not loud people in the first place; though, Konan had a kind of secret, quiet ire that made lesser men shake in their boots when it was drawn in their direction.

If only it still worked on Hidan….

Deidara eventually extricated himself from Sasori’s lap, as comfortable as it was, and helped his friend pack up the rest of his supplies till they were to be used again. His abdominal muscles hurt from shouting verbal tics and a heaviness born of stress tugged at his eyelids. Honestly, a nap with Sasori sounded pretty great right about now.

It took Deidara three tries to unlock his suite door, all but throwing his keys to the ground with a few poorly timed tics. His shoulders were starting to hurt again, even despite the massage Sasori had so kindly given him earlier. The man in question waited patiently till he finally succeeded and let out a victory cry that was surely going to have his next door neighbors complaining, holding Deidara’s other hand.

To Deidara’s unending shock and surprise, Itachi was sitting in the communal area when he flung the door open with enough force to rattle it on its hinges, looking up in an expression of panicked shock that would’ve looked more at home on a deer in headlights. He wore his usual cardigan and sweater combination (how he wasn’t sweating to death in the poorly circulated dorm heating, Deidara would never know) with a pair of round frameless reading glasses low on his nose and an array of textbooks spread out on the coffee table. A thin laptop sat open in his lap, a notebook open to a page of near obsessively perfectly colored coded and organized notes to his left. He blinked. Deidara blinked back. Sasori yawned.

“Hello.” Itachi said, slowly shutting his laptop with a click. “I didn’t know you would be having company over. Give me a few minutes and I’ll have this cleaned up—“

“Don’t bother, yeah,” Deidara assured him, waving a hand in dismissal. Sasori shut the door behind them and began dragging Deidara towards the room he knew to be his, if not for the sign reading “DEIDARA” in big block letters on the door then for the faint smell of gunpowder creeping out from underneath the seal of the door. “We’re just gonna be in my room.”

“Oh.” Itachi said. He adjusted his little grandma glasses. Blinked again.

“Sasori Danna. Arts and forensic sciences major.” Sasori introduced himself from over his shoulder, just barely bothering to force enough inflection into his voice to sound like he cared.

“Itachi Uchiha…. Culinary science major.” Itachi said in return, looking down at his own books with the kind of slight bafflement that might’ve made Deidara wonder if he even meant to put them there in the first place, if what he’d seen of the man already weren’t so damn meticulous. Sasori hummed, and then Deidara’s bedroom door was shutting behind them with a bang and Itachi was no longer in sight.

Deidara locked, unlocked, and locked it again behind them, as was a habit he’d been unable to kick ever since childhood. Sasori immediately removed his own pants, throwing them over the back of Deidara’s desk chair and motioning for him to come closer so he could help remove his prostheses. Deidara removed his own skinny jeans, which was a considerably harder feat when one didn’t have the use of arms to do so with, and threw them in a similar direction without bothering to watch where they landed.

He dutifully shuffled closer, holding his arms out as Sasori flicked the switches into the off position and ran his finger underneath the edges to release the seal. Deidara could put on and remove his arms on his own, of course, he’d had plenty of time to learn how to do so since his friends weren’t always at his beck and call, contrary to popular belief. But it was just nice sometimes, to let himself be taken care of and take care of another person in return.

Deidara was more than a little strange about touch, he knew this like fact. He didn’t like to reach out and touch people with his own hands, didn’t like to initiate that level of vulnerability without knowing for sure if it would be returned. It was so pitiful, almost, to reach out with his own two hands like he expected the return of affection to be a promise, when it had never been there in the first place and likely wouldn’t stay around forever.

(His friends assured him time and time again this was not the case. He still couldn’t believe them, not the way he wanted to, not with his whole heart and vulnerable, smoldering soul.) Instead he left the offer of affection open, left himself available for physical touch, didn’t balk from casual intimacy and affectionate gestures from the people he trusted. They knew he would let them know if he was uncomfortable, whether it be through harsh screams or a push away hard enough to bruise.

Hidan had sported quite the shiner for a while early on in their friendship, when Deidara had instinctively elbowed him in the face as Hidan attempted to guide him with a gentle hand between his shoulder blades (one of the few things about him that would ever be gentle.) But the guy was still his friend, so that had to count for something, maybe.

Deidara’s therapist would be proud of him for making mental connections like this. He’d have to keep it in mind for their next session.

So he let his friends touch him, with the caveat that he be allowed to kick and scream as fiercely as he wanted should he be averse to it and they weren’t allowed to hold it against him. He let them brush his hair back and hand him things he’d ticced out of his own hands and lean on his shoulder or wrap a comforting arm around his shoulders in return. He let himself be vulnerable, in his own specific flavor, and things continued on.

Which was partially why the addition of this new stranger into his life was stinging so bitterly, with the fact that he couldn’t even trust him to speak to him without judgement, let alone touch him.

Sasori gently rolled down the gel sleeves that protected his stumps from the inner workings of his prostheses, having already set his arms aside on the nightstand to charge while they slept. The sleeves went on top of the arms and he turned his back to allow Sasori to remove his shirt and binder and redress him in one of the football hoodies pilfered from Kisame that still smelled like the man’s cologne and specific brand of laundry detergent, though they’d dressed and undressed around each other so often it didn’t really even matter at this point.

Deidara flopped back-first onto his single-sized bed, hair fanning out underneath him and mattress creaking as Sasori crawled in next to him, poking him in the side with his bony knees till he wiggled into a position that Sasori could comfortably conform his skinny frame to. Deidara sighed, deeply, through his nose, and let the scent of Kisame’s hoodie and the feeling of Sasori’s warm, bony frame melted into his side like a particularly large leech lull him into a dreamless sleep.

Deidara awoke groggily with a bone-deep soreness from stomach to neck, as he usually did. Sasori was still clinging to his side like it was his job, though he seemed to have been awake for a while as he was scrolling idly through his phone, hand braced on Deidara’s chest. A glance through the partially drawn curtains confirmed it was late afternoon, several hours after they’d initially settled in. Deidara stretched with a groan, shoulders popping. He moved to sit up and Sasori made a noise that sounded awfully like a growl.

“You’re not moving till we figure out what your deal is with your roommate.” Sasori deadpanned. Deidara groaned a second time, louder, stretching his limbs out in as far of a starfish shape as Sasori’s position against his side would allow.

“Do we have to?” he whined, putting on the best puppy dog eyes and quivering lip in his arsenal, though it had long since stopped working on Sasori and both of them knew it.

“Yes.”

Deidara sighed. At least he tried.

“Did you go talk to him at all?”

Sasori made a vague motion to his still-pantless lower half, brow cocked. “What do you think.”

Deidara hummed. “Unless you’ve taken up a secret side hustle as a stripper, no, yeah.” He rubbed the sleep from his eyes with his left stump, letting it flop back to the mattress and committing to the fact that they would’ve had to have this conversation at some point or another. Best to rip the bandaid clean off before it started falling off on its own and blood came oozing out. “Whaddya wanna know, hm?”

“Why do you dislike him so much? And don’t just say it’s because he’s hot, because I’ve seen him now and he isn’t even your type.” Sasori poked him in the ribs and Deidara squawked.

“I… don’t know, hm. You know, like, when you see someone and you, yeah, immediately know they’re gonna try and be better than you, hm? Like, the feeling of instant competition. I think that’s what it is.”

“How do you feel when you’re around him?”

“Awkward, mostly, but it’s not like he makes it any easier, hm.”

Sasori snorted. “Right you are for once, brat.”

“Excuse me, yeah! I’m plenty right all of the time!”

“Remember when you insisted you could work Kakuzu’s fancy hair dryer on your own and ended up burning half your hair?”

“Okay, in my defense, it was a very complicated manual!”

“Yahiko had to shave your head.”

“I looked very good with an undercut, thank you very much, hm.” Deidara sniffed.

“I’m sure that that was what you meant as you blubbered the entire time he shaved it off.”

“Hey, Yahiko is great and all, hm! But he’s not gentle at all!” Deidara poked Sasori’s cheek accusingly, who grumbled but made no move to push his arm away. Wow, he really was settling in for a serious conversation, about _feelings_ of all things. The mere concept nearly had Deidara recoiling in disgust. “I’m just tender-headed-- yeah, hm!”

“We can discuss your impulsiveness and inability to follow directions later,” Sasori said, voice muffled from where Deidara continued to squish his face with his left stump. “But right now we’re talking about your weird hot roommate.”

“So you do admit he’s hot!” Deidara crowed victoriously, perhaps a touch too loud for the thin suite walls. He could’ve sworn he heard something crash from the other room.

“Watch it, brat,” Sasori growled, grabbing Deidara’s arm and moving it aside so it would no longer be squishing the tempting baby-softness of his cheek. Really, if Deidara hadn’t known he and Sasori were almost the same age, he would’ve thought Sasori was just old enough to get his learner’s permit. He looked almost the exact same as he had when they first met as teenagers. “Or else I’ll--”

From across the room, Sasori’s pocket buzzed, pants thrown over the back of Deidara’s desk chair, and continued buzzing. He reluctantly peeled himself away from Deidara’s side and struggled out of the divot their conjoined bodies had made in the mattress, running a hand through short sleep-mussed crimson curls. He limped over to his pants and retrieved his phone, fumbling for the answer call button with the kind of stiffness that always followed sleep for him. His fingers, stiff and unwieldy at the best of times, became nigh useless after just having woken up.

“Hello?” he muttered, finally having answered the call with wooden movements. Deidara tilted his head, watching from upside-down as his friend scrubbed a hand down his face. “No, yeah, I can do that…. Yes, of course…. Alright, thank you.”

Sasori ended the call with a grimace, tossing his phone in the general direction of the bed and not watching to see if it hit Deidara in the face, who narrowly avoided it with a panicked yelp. Sasori struggled back into his pants, not bothering to tuck his shirt back in or finger comb his hair back into place-- not that it would’ve made much of a difference, at that point. “We’ll continue this another time, don’t think you can get out of this.”

He sighed. “Boss called me in. I have to go.”

“Hell yeah, go cut up more dead people! Get that hustle!”

“Watch your mouth, brat,” Sasori growled, reaching over to tweak Deidara’s nose. “I’m a mortician in training, not a serial killer with a bad schtick.”

Deidara shrugged, leveraging himself upward into a stretch, shoulders popping and sore muscles creaking in protest. One of his long string of physical and occupational therapists had given him some stretches for situations like this, a long time ago, before they learned trying to get Deidara to do anything he didn’t want to do in the first place was nigh fruitless. “Hey, it’s all dead bodies.”

“Have some respect for the dead, fool,” Sasori grumbled, finally getting his pants buttoned. He wiggled his fingers in a stretch, face scrunched up like he could work the paralysis out of them if he thought about it hard enough. His best friend could be so stubborn, sometimes, but Deidara supposed that that was part of why they got along so well. “Want your arms?”

“Nah, I’ll put ‘em on later, yeah. Hm, hm-- let me walk you to the door.” Deidara slipped off the bed. The difference between his and Kisame’s sizes meant that the hoodie came down nearly to his knees, sleeves hanging far past the blunt ends of his stumps. He wouldn’t bother with pants. Itachi was going to see all there was about him soon enough, anyhow.

He walked Sasori the short distance to the suite door, throwing an arm around him and pressing a kiss to the top of his head with a loud, overdramatic smack. Sasori grumbled but wound his skinny arms around Deidara’s middle all the same, giving him a tight squeeze that he would never have dared attempt in public, if for fear of his reputation. Deidara didn’t really get it, considering the guy was five foot nothing at best and weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet and had a permanent baby face, but he wasn’t gonna stop him. Sasori clung like a leech when they were alone, so it wouldn’t do to embarrass the guy for a few moments of amusement when he could very well decide to start withholding all touch from there on out.

Deidara had done more for less, but he actually liked Sasori, so he wasn’t going to push it.

Deidara said his goodbyes, telling Sasori to drive safely or he’d kick his ass, and pulled the door shut behind him with the fabric pull-tab loop he’d attached to all the handles in the suite on his first day in. He didn’t always have his arms when he needed to close or open something, after all.

Deidara spun on his heel only to see Itachi, sitting on the couch again, surrounded by books and face almost as red as Sasori’s hair. He clutched a textbook loosely in long-fingered hands, and… were his glasses starting to steam up? Deidara blanched, now reckoning with the fact that his roommate was likely even more of a prude than he first thought.

“Uh.” Itachi said, stammering.

Deidara cocked a brow. Itachi continued to stammer, removing his glasses to wipe them on his shirt.

“Sorry, I, ah-- I hadn’t realized-- if I had known I would’ve--” Itachi stuttered, beginning to wheeze in his distress. He gave a hacking cough, haphazardly pressing his face into the crook of his sweater-clad elbow as more coughs began to wrack his body. Deidara started, making an aborted movement towards him, even though there was likely little he could do.

“Ah, shit, I’m sorry-- yeah, hm! Is there-- hm!-- is there anything I can do to help, yeah?” Shit, if he killed his roommate then Housing was going to have his entire ass on a platter. He could see the headlines now; _“Local Arts Student Kills Roommate Via Embarrassment.”_

While Deidara had always envisioned himself in the headlines, that definitely wasn’t the way he wanted it to go.

Itachi waved him off, leaning back against the back of the couch in what appeared to be an attempt to relax himself. His ribs strained against his skin with each cough, nearly visible even through the thick knit of his sweater. Man, this guy was a mess.

“Itachi?” Deidara hazarded, creeping closer in sock-clad feet. “Are you alright, yeah?”

Normally, when one of his friends or he himself was having some kind of physical attack-- whether an Autistic meltdown, a tic attack, heart palpitations, abdominal spasms, or any of the other aggressive, episodic symptoms that came with their menagerie of disabilities and chronic illnesses-- he knew what to do. He always knew what to do. For a while, Deidara himself had carried a small information sheet, by requisite of his doctor, filled with bullet points and simple graphics on what a tic attack was and how to help him through one. He kept it, still, lamination peeling and letters starting to fade, in the deep recesses of his backpack, just in case he wound up without one of his trusted people in the midst of an attack. That was rarer, these days, and he generally had someone with him at all times (he was perfectly independent, thank you very much, it was just nice to have the safety net of company) but there was always the chance hanging over his head like the blade of a guillotine that he would be stuck somewhere, panicked and alone.

He carried muscle relaxers in his bag, kept them in his nightstand and in the little suite bathroom, just in case. It was hard to get to them, when he could barely control his muscles long enough to open a pill bottle and keep from throwing the contents astray, and even harder still to get something to wash it down with. He generally took those pills dry, for that very reason. When he was younger he’d even had a crash helmet, a mushroom-top-shaped piece of headgear that got buckled on his head when his tics got particularly violent and edged towards self harming. He’d hit himself on the head with a wooden rolling pin, once, and nearly gave himself a concussion without the helmet to protect his skull.

It sat in the bottom of his closet, but he still kept it with him. Just in case.

Even if he hadn’t any experience with attacks of his own, he’d experienced enough of his friends’ to know what to do when someone was in distress. From sitting with Konan in a dark room, gathering little sheets of paper for her to fold origami while tears ran down her face and she rocked back and forth, to catching Kakuzu’s bulk as his heart began to hammer so hard in his chest he became too dizzy to stand and had to be carefully lowered to the floor, to mopping at the back of Hidan’s neck with a cold rag while he squinted in pain, head between his legs, in attempts to ward off a migraine born of straining his sensitive eyes for a few hours too long. He knew what to do, and even if he didn’t, he could still suss it out. He was clever like that.

He didn’t care much for other people outside his little group of trusted friends, but he was always the first to act in moments of crisis, even if he didn’t know what was happening.

But right now… he didn’t know what to do.

Itachi looked up, face no longer flushed with embarrassment but instead the red of exertion, eyes glassy through his lenses and lips wet. The inner elbow of the sweater sleeve he’d been coughing into was damp, cream fibers flecked with red speckles that could only be blood. Deidara started again, though he had no idea what to do, because he didn’t know this guy. Itachi seemed a very private person, considering he’d held his cards so close to his chest that Deidara had only learned today he was pursuing a degree in culinary sciences. Itachi looked down at his sleeve with disdain, heaving a shaky, put upon sigh.

“It’s okay.” he said, even though it was certainly not okay, considering he had just coughed up blood like a Victorian gentleman in a period drama would into his kercheif, only to tuck it into his pocket and carry on like nothing was wrong.

Okay, maybe he’d been watching a few too many period dramas with Kakuzu, but his point still stood.

“Hemoptysis.” Itachi said, like that meant anything. Deidara cocked his head in confusion and Itachi sighed again, though slightly less shaky this time. He explained, but turned his face away from Deidara, tips of his ears coloring red beneath the fall of his dark hair, pulled into a low tail at the nape of his neck. “It’s a symptom of cystic fibrosis.”

“Oh.” Deidara said, because there wasn’t really anything else to say to that. He’d expected Itachi to be similarly disabled or chronically ill as he himself was, considering he was also not high enough of an upperclassman to have a suite yet, technically, but he didn’t expect the guy to give out his diagnostic history like that when they were still practically strangers. Deidara sat, careful to telegraph his movements miles in advance, at the edge of the couch furthest from Itachi, who rubbed at his chest. He didn’t know much about cystic fibrosis, but he wasn’t stupid enough to think he could catch a genetic disease.“Anything I can-- yeah-- do to help?”

“Uh, well,” Itachi glanced in his direction, though his gaze stayed decidedly somewhere around Deidara’s knees. “You can’t catch it, I can assure you that.”

Deidara snorted. “I know, hm, I’m not stupid. I have Tourette’s. You can’t catch that either.”

“And your--” he motioned at the empty ends of Deidara’s too-big sleeves, “--those?”

“You can’t catch amputation either, dork.” Deidara rolled his eyes. “No, I don’t have anything contagious, you’re fine, hm. And I’m still perfectly capable-- fuck off!-- still perfectly capable of doing things on my own without my prostheses, yeah.”

Itachi blanched at the curse, but he seemed a smart enough guy to figure out it was just another tic. Deidara was one of the ten-something percent of those who had Tourette’s to have coprolalia, which consisted of verbal tics of forbidden words or phrases. It was a lot less common than the media made it out, which was both fortunate and not for Deidara.

Fortunate, because it explained away Deidara’s odd cursing tic here and there, but unfortunate as well because that was all people expected his tics to be. The looks on their faces when he started throwing things or stamping his feet out of nowhere were pretty good, though, truth be told.

Deidara tucked his knees against his chest, resting his chin on the worn blue fabric of Kisame’s hoodie. Itachi whipped his head away so fast Deidara could’ve sworn he heard a crack.

“I didn’t mean to imply you couldn’t.” Itachi cleared his throat, though it sounded more out of social awkwardness than another coughing fit. Deidara hummed.

“Your… friend, seems nice.” Itachi said after a while. Deidara’s nose scrunched, a giggle burbling out of him.

“Sasori is one of the rudest bitches I’ve ever met, hm.”

“You seem to like him well enough,” Itachi countered, raising a brow.

“Yeah, he’s the person I’m closest to in the entire world.”

“I hope I wasn’t, ah, putting a damper on things, for the two of you.” Itachi cleared his throat again, adjusting his glasses, which were starting to fog up around the edges of the lenses again.

“Don’t worry about it, hm! We were just sleeping together, hm, hm.” He’d been taking naps with Sasori practically since they met. There was something about laying in the same bed, or couch, or even just in the same area of floor with him that put Deidara at ease enough to fall asleep. He suspected Sasori laced his shampoo with muscle relaxers that Deidara unintentionally huffed whenever he buried his face in Sasori’s overgrown buzzcut, or something. There was no way he could just naturally be that relaxed around another person.

(The many, many photos Hidan had saved on his phone of the two of them cuddling in odd positions and even odder places begged to differ.)

Itachi choked, and Deidara was worried he was going to send himself into another coughing fit, but he simply stood up and excused himself to his room under the excuse of it being time for a breathing treatment. Deidara simply watched him go, wrapped up in the soft fabric of Kisame’s hoodie, breathing in the scent of Kisame’s cologne and Sasori’s shampoo. His sculptures could wait, for at least a little while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for reading! i hope everyone is enjoying this fic so far as much as i am. as always, comments, concrit, and questions are always appreciated! <3

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so so much for reading my inane ramblings, i promise that if you like this there's much more to come! also, i want to make it clear that i did not make the members of the akatsuki disabled because i think all disabled people are evil or other harmful tropes of that ilk. it just so happens that both myself and the friend who helped me create this au are disabled, as are most of my close friends, and i find that disabled people do tend to gravitate towards each other like penguins in a huddle. if anyone has concern or questions about how i portrayed disability or a specific character's disability in this, please comment so i may answer! i love talking about this au and will always be happy to answer any questions.  
> as always, comments, concrit, and questions are always appreciated! i hope everyone's staying safe <3


End file.
